Re-examining the role of family relationships in structuring perceived helping obligations, and their impact on moral evaluation

Abstract

Although recent research has highlighted that social relationships influence moral judgment, many questions remain. Across two pre-registered experiments (total N = 1310), we investigated one social relationship and its link to morality: kinship and its obligations. Experiment 1 varied genetic relatedness between helpers and beneficiaries (i.e., strangers, cousins, siblings), investigating differences in perceived obligations to help and downstream moral evaluations of helpers. Experiment 2 investigated whether these patterns varied via agents being estranged versus friendly, and whether relatedness impacts obligation judgments through other social interaction inferences (e.g., social closeness, frequency of prior help). Before helping occurred, agents were judged as having stronger obligations toward relatives than strangers, and closer relatives (i.e., siblings) than distant relatives (i.e., cousins). After helping occurred, agents who helped strangers were judged as more morally good than agents who helped relatives, but agents who helped strangers instead of relatives (or cousins instead of siblings) were judged as less morally good than agents who did the opposite. Perceived obligation differences shaped moral evaluation differences at the individual level only in contexts where agents helped one beneficiary over another. Importantly, social interaction inference differences were always more strongly correlated with obligation judgment differences than relatedness judgment differences were. Additionally, endorsement of family values and ingroup-loyalty correlated positively with obligations toward family, whereas endorsement of impartial beneficence correlated positively with obligations toward strangers. By broadening the theoretical and methodological scope of prior work, this research offers a richer characterization of some of the determinants and consequences of perceiving obligations to help.